Book review: A Wrinkle in Time

Most books I review here I am very positive about.  I guess I am just very easy to please.  But with my most recent two books I am not so impressed.  One of these is A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle.  (I am still only halfway through the other book, and I plan to review it here once I am finished.)

On the dust jacket, A Wrinkle in Time is called "science fantasy".  This is an appropriate description.  On the one hand, it has elements of science fiction, because it uses some science (and speculative science) in its storyline.  But it is not solidly in the science fiction camp, because it really only hints at the science, and is not clear enough in the explanation.

On the other hand, it has elements of fantasy, because the world the characters inhabit is supernatural.  But it is not solidly in the fantasy camp either because it implies that the supernatural realm is, at least in large part, very advanced science that is beyond human understanding to the point of being mystical.

Whatever the case about that, it is clearly in the speculative fiction genre.

The story itself centres around a young teen, Meg, who ticks all the right boxes for being the protagonist of teenage fiction.  She is smart, reflective and warm-hearted, and inside her head she has got a reasonable and intelligible inner-dialogue going on.  But in the outside world she is awkward, geeky, rebellious, unpopular, ugly, sullen and troublesome.  She gets into fights and doesn't get good grades at school.

Meg lives with her mother, who is a scientist, her twin younger brothers, who are just "normal" because they are sporty and popular and only so-so smart, and her youngest brother (Charles Wallace), who is abnormally bright.  Meg's father has mysteriously gone missing while working on a secret government research project.

The story gets going when Meg, Charles Wallace and a new school-friend, Calvin, meet up with three mysterious women (Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which), who whisk them off to other planets to fight against evil and rescue the dad.

This basic plot might be workable (after all, many successful stories have weirder plots), but its execution, in my opinion, is a near complete disaster.  Each separate aspect of it is bad, to the point where nothing makes the book redeemable.

To begin with, the writing style is fairly amateurish.  While I don't pretend to be a good writer myself, and probably couldn't do any better, I believe I can tell the difference between a skilled writer and a poor writer.  Good writers, like Katherine Mansfield [my book review is lost], are able to give depth and subtlety through what is implied.  Bad writers are clumsy with words.  This was just clumsy.

Secondly, the characters are far too two-dimensional.  Meg never rises beyond the stereotype of the troubled, bright, self-doubting teen.  The dad becomes a joke when we learn that "he's a PhD several times over", and worked at Princeton and Cambridge.  And Charles Wallace is completely unbelievable as the super-bright youngster.  In some ways he reminded me of the children in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.  The things he said were just too ridiculously mature to have been said by someone whose age is still in single digits.  I was hoping that the end of the story would reveal something about him that would explain his super-brightness (the product of a science experiment maybe?), but nothing did.  He was just weirdly, inappropriately, and unbelievably god-like in his ability to understand everything and read other people's minds.

Thirdly, the references to science and bright ideas was disappointingly limited.  For a book that was supposed to be about super-smart people, it was disappointing that nothing particularly deep was said throughout.  I got the impression that the author actually didn't know much about these sorts of intellectual things herself, and was just bluffing her way through it all.  All too often, after brief and shallow references to stereotypically smart stuff, the author simply resorted to mysticism, with the super-smart characters saying it was beyond the other characters' abilities to understand, so they didn't need to explain it.

Fourthly, one of the central themes of the book was good versus evil, but this was done very superficially.  The children in the story were introduced to the issue when they were shown blackness in space.  In the story, they were immediately horrified to the point of near-collapse.  Similarly, when they encountered those on the side of good, they immediately recognised them as good.  Of course, this is ridiculously naive, and good and evil are complex and subtle, coming in various degrees and are sometimes difficult to recognise.

Related to this, there was very dated cold-war propaganda (the book was published in 1962).  The big, bad, alien evil turned out to be a totalitarian regime, where everyone was controlled by a giant brain and all did things in unison.  (In the book, Earth is somewhat blackened by this evil, and the fight is still in the balance.)

This all meant that as I read the book, I repeatedly felt so bugged by this low-quality nonsense that I wanted to stop.  Only two things kept me going -- firstly, that it was short, at 180 pages, and secondly that my Big Sis said there is a twist at the end that explained things better.

Since I don't recommend you read the book, I am happy to give away the ending, for what it is worth.  (Close your eyes as you read this, if you don't want to know.)

SPOILER ALERT!!!  SPOILER ALERT!!!

Finally, towards the end of the book, a version of Christianity was revealed (some Christians may not call it real Christianity).  The central theme can be summed up by this quote:

"The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. ... God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty."

The idea in the story, then, was that the wisest, strongest and smartest human characters -- the dad and Charles Wallace -- were captured by the evil brain (both mostly through ignorance, as the dad arrived there by uncontrolled accident and Charles Wallace was overly confident of his ability to control his own mind).  And even with all their superior smarts they couldn't escape.

But Meg, who was not so smart, could succeed where they had failed.  Firstly, she trusted the three mysterious women (who may have been angels) and faithfully followed their instructions by appropriately using their gifts, and secondly she showed love in the face of evil.  The evil brain couldn't handle love, and Charles Wallace was returned.

Love is good, trust is good.  And I have no problem at all with that.

But what I do have a problem with is the implied (pseudo-)intellectual anti-intellectualism that permeated the last part of the book.

(The Harry Potter series has similar themes of love and relationships, but doesn't emphasise them by trashing reason.)

I am more than happy to acknowledge that there are lots of things in the world that are super-difficult to the point of probably being beyond me.  I am also happy to acknowledge that, despite my best efforts, I am going to get lots of things wrong.  And often I am not going to know which things I am right about and which things I am wrong about.  As I see it, it is about being both humble and optimistic at the same time.

But I don't like anti-intellectual pessimism, which appears to delight in trying to trip up those who strive for excellence.  That quote above sounds pretty nasty to want to try to confound the wise and mighty.  Why not praise them and help raise them up more?  (Dare I say it, but this strikes me as exactly what Friedrich Nietzsche was critical of when he engaged in his deep psychological analyses of slave morality.)

I also don't like the way this idea was phrased in what tried to be intellectual language.  Simply put, it is not intellectual, and to me the author came across as pretty ignorant of, and uneducated about, these sorts of ideas.

To put it in a nutshell, this is one of the worst books I have read in quite a while, and I would not recommend it to anyone.  It worries me somewhat that I got this book from our local homeschooling library.  Our children can do far better than to waste their time with this sort of rubbish.